In 1942, then-president Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent tax rate on income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $484,000 today. Congress wouldn’t go along with that 100 percent top rate. But lawmakers did give the okay to a 94 percent top tax rate on 1944 income over $200,000.

In the 1950s, under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, the federal tax rate on top-bracket income never dipped below 91 percent.

Today’s top-bracket federal income tax rate? That stands, on paper, at 37 percent on income over $693,751 for a couple filing jointly. But assorted loopholes have left the tax rate the rich face on their actual annual gains enormously lower.

In 2021, a joint report from the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers calculated that America’s wealthiest 400 billionaire families, between 2010 and 2018, “paid an average of just 8.2 percent of their income” — counting the gains in the value of their investments — in federal individual income taxes.

“That’s a lower rate,” the report noted, “than many ordinary Americans pay.”

Could we ever get back to anything close to Eisenhower-era tax rates on the richest among us? This past March, the Biden administration proposed a 25 percent minimum tax on the total income — including unrealized capital gains — of the nation’s top 0.01 percent, households worth at least $100 million.

About the same time, progressive lawmakers — led by U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and representatives Pramila Jayapal from Washington State and Brendan Boyle from Pennsylvania —  introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, legislation that would impose a wealth tax on America’s 100,000 wealthiest households, our richest 0.05 percent.

Under this proposed legislation, wealthy households worth up to $1 billion would face an annual tax of 2 percent on their wealth over $50 million. Richer households would face an additional 1 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.

One of the Senate co-sponsors of that legislation, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, has also gone a step further and called for a 100 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.

“I think people can make it on $999 million,” Sanders told journalist Chris Wallace last year.

Sanders and one of America’s most famous deep pockets, Bill Gates, have actually had a friendly podcast discussion over whether our tax rates should allow billion-dollar fortunes to even exist. The Sanders proposal, noted Gates, would tax away over 99 percent of his personal fortune. Gates would be willing to let the IRS take 62 percent, about $100 billion.

For a better America, that certainly might make a good place to start.